I went up to Worcester, MA last night to see the Nine Inch Nails (NIN) tour which I've been writing about, and I'm glad I did (Live Daily review of the Worcester show here). Here's a time lapse of about 10 minutes of the show:

My friend Jamie Anderson of Rational Acoustics got in touch with Jamie Pollack, Firehouse's system engineer on the tour and we were able to get in to hear the system during soundcheck, which was great. The PA is an all new L-Acoustics K1 system, which is in its "pilot" phase; the same cabinets were out on Radiohead this summer. I have worked on a lot of big systems, and I have to say I was never really a fan of L-Acoustics' V-DOSC series of speakers. But the K1 is a whole different story, and Jamie and mixer Pete Klepper had the system sounding great!

The V-DOSC, to my ears, had some harsh midrange problems, but in the K1 series they seem to have really cleaned this up and it sounded great. In addition, with the V-DOSC, if you walked through the vertical coverage overlaps of the individual boxes (walking towards or away from the stage, typically) I always heard some nasty phase cancellation. But in the K1, they have also done something to really clean this up, and walking through the boxes on this rig, things sounded very smooth. And the low frequency, especially in this setup, was unbelievable. And the audience agreed--here they are cheering the subwoofers, with an incredible amount of 40 Hz sound (we know it was 40Hz thanks to the SMAART screen, and that sound was too low for my little camera mic to pick up):

The interactive video and lighting was very cool, although apparently the Moment Factory people finished their work on the tour and were not around, and unfortunately given time contraints (the opener's sound check finished as the house was opening) I wasn't able to talk to any of the video people on the tour to get more info. But you can read some details here in my previous entry, and here's some video of some cool parts of the video:

Control Geek

I'm John Huntington, Professor of Entertainment Technology, sound engineer, and author of the book Show Networks and Control Systems. This site covers entertainment technology, severe weather, photography, and anything else that I find interesting.